I’ll admit it: I dropped the F-bomb, the mother of all cuss words. It is language that didn’t exactly match the white dog collar I happened to be wearing at the time (I was driving home from a graveside funeral), but I said it anyway, and I think the sentiment was appropriate, especially for a man of the cloth.

After all, this is 2008, almost seventy years after the Holocaust, when as many as 500,000 Roma people died alongside European Jews in Nazi concentration camps. The human family—especially in Europe—was supposed to evolve beyond such ethnic bigotry. The Holocaust is still a living memory for many people in the world today. What’s wrong with our collective recollection?

While the Italian government has attempted to spin the fingerprinting of Roma people as an effort to alleviate conditions in overcrowded and unsanitary camps which are home to much of the Italian Roma population, they also acknowledge that the fingerprinting and registering is part of an effort to reduce street crime. Italy’s Interior Minster Roberto Maroni, the architect of the fingerprinting scheme, told the European parliament that fingerprinting Roma in Italy is necessary in order to fight crime and identify illegal immigrants.

Maroni, it turns out, represents the parliamentary district in Northern Italy where my great-grandparents were born. It’s a place I’ve visited a couple of times, and if there’s a problem with petty crime perpetrated by anyone of any ethnicity in that district I’d be very surprised to hear about it; it’s often the case that people from ethnically homogeneous rural regions express fear around what goes on in populated areas with greater ethnic diversity and higher rates of poverty and crime. It happen in the Unites States (I know, because I was raised in such a monochromatic rural community), so it should come as no surprise that such ignorant prejudice could happen elsewhere as well.

The Roma have a reputation for committing petty crime in Italy. It is a negative stereotype that has plagued the European Roma population for centuries. In times of economic uncertainty (such as today and in Germany before the Second World War) European Roma populations often become scapegoats and the targets of violence born of fear. It’s hard to imagine such xenophobic banality exists today in Italy, a country that in so many ways seems advanced and enlightened. Alas, the sins of the past are never as far behind us as we wish they were.

The idea that the Italian government should punish the Roma in an effort to reduce crime is absurd and ironic. While it may (or may not) be true that Roma people commit crimes at a disproportionately high rate in Italy, the Italian political class hardly is in a position to cast the stones of judgment. Italian politicians may not be picking the pockets of Belgian tourists on the Ponte Vecchio, but it’s hard to imagine a shadier group of lawmakers outside of a Banana Republic.

Take, for example, Silvio Berlusconi, whose governing collation has spawned this most recent abuse of the Roma people. On a page that was last updated in 2004, Wikipedia lists 12 separate trials faced by Berlusconi. The charges include: false testimony, false accounting, embezzlement, tax fraud, corrupting a judge, illegally financing a political party, corruption, and perjury. In all but one of the cases he evaded punishment not by disputing the charges, but by dragging the appeals process on past the statute of limitations—something you can do in Italy. Further, it is alleged that Silvio Berlusconi has links with the Sicilian Mafia, and that he uses his position as head of state to further the fortunes of his vast media empire.
Officials in Spain have indicted Berlusconi on charges of tax fraud, but he has relied on his status as a member of the European Parliament to gain immunity. Evidently he likes this method of fighting legal battles: just last Friday, at his behest, the Italian lower house of parliament passed a law that would grant legal immunity to all Italian Prime Ministers and Presidents.

For his part, Interior Minister Maroni has admitted to downloading illegally copied music form the internet; Wikipedia—without citing a reference—reports that Roberto Maroni spent nearly five months in jail for impeding a legal investigation of his political party’s Milan headquarters.

It stands to reason that if the Italian government wants to address the problem of crime by keeping tabs on a population with a proven track record of criminal activity, they should be fingerprinting and registering Italian politicians.

The Italian move to fingerprint and register Roma people is simply inexcusable, and it gives the governments of the world’s powerful nations the opportunity to condemn and to prevent ethnic cleansing and genocide before it begins, something they failed to do in places like the Balkans, Rwanda and Darfur. For people of faith this should be a time for outrage. The European Parliament, UNICEF, Amnesty International, The Roman Catholic Church and Italy’s main Protestant groups all have condemned the fingerprinting and registering of the Italian Roma. Christians and other people of faith in the Unites States and around the world must join the cause.

Alas, my people are under attack once again. My roots tangle back to the Andalucian mountains where our DNA mingled with Sephardic, Semetic and Hispanic carriers. We have always been nomadic, easy targets for sit-tight types. In Southern California where we now live, whenever something is missing or mysteriously tampered with, it is blamed on the “illegal immigrants” passing north to San Jose, Francisco or Diego.

We Gypsies, and I use the term with pride, appreciate your standing with us in our century long fight to clear our name, celebrate our culture, and challenge the prejudice of a people who have brought us the likes of the Mafia, Mussolini and Frank Sinatra. A curse on the House of Berlusconi and his political party.

I was approached by 2 gypsy girls in Milan once, they came right up to me with outstretched hands and before I knew it one of the sneeky bitches had her hand in my sporran (I was there for a Scotland match) luckily I felt it or she would have been off with my wallet.

The only thing that she did leave with was a very sore throat and a shit in her pants as my hand clasped round her throat and squeezed whilst a volley of vitriolic Scottish swear words in a very broad Glaswegian accent assaulted her and her accomplice. I can still see the utter fear in her eyes as her legs buckled and her friend pleaded for me to let her go.

An Italian guy ran over and started giving them abuse asked if I was ok and told me to be on my way which I did.

This is my only experience of crime in any of the places I have ever been, The countless identical stories I heard from that trip from footsoldiers that were not as ‘lucky’ as me was incredible. Petty crime and the Gypsy population of Italy may be seen as a stereotype but in my view it’s one that sticks.

In saying that i do not believe that what the Italian government are proposing is a correct path to be taking but they will change their minds, they have a history of doing so. 😉

I’ve also heard lots of stories about Roma crime in Italy, and I have no problem enacting and enforcing laws against such crime. However, where the current Italian government gets it wrong is in forgetting that crime is not a function of ethnicity but of economy. The Roma don’t pick pockets (or sporrans) because they are Romani, but because they are poor and have been for centuries.

No matter where you go in the world it generally is the case that there is a higher rate of petty crime perpetrated among poor and minority communities. I’ll leave it to sociologists to explain that, but I’ll also point out that white-collar crime and political corruption is more common among the dominant communities, so it seems that people commit crime in whatever circumstance they find themselves.

Like you, I hope the Italian government changes their minds! Let them fight crime and not people.

The problem lies with nations that eagerly dump their non-productive, dregs of society onto their neighbors. The liberal do-gooders in the host countries allow the influx. Then, both citizens and new arrivals alike are left to sort out the mess. Italy is certainly not the only nation struggling with this problem.

I think the issue of Italy’s plan to fingerprint Roma really has little to do with illegal or undocumented migration. Roma people have lived on the Italian peninsula for centuries. Italy, as we know it today, came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that many Italian Roma people are immigrants, but Italian law isn’t differentiating between the two populations. It’s racial profiling, not the enforcement of immigration laws.

It is as if California decided to fingerprint people of Mexican decent and made do distinction between someone who arrived last Thursday and native born Californians or even the descendants of the folks who lived in California while it was still part of Mexico.

The issue you raise certainly is one that needs to be addressed (though you and I may come down on different sides of the issue), but I think the question of Italy’s fingerprinting of Roma people is different and bigger.

In reply to Ben and Ron,we in this country have a high level of sociological hate-a social hate at the basic levels of socialness ,not as much of a problem in most of the industrial countries since they have taken responsive measures. many U.S.STATES AND E.U.COUNTRIES SHALL AGREE WITH ITALY.

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The Irish bailout, like the Greece bailout and the looming Portugal bailout, isn’t about saving the Irish people, it’s about preserving the elite-owned banking system that leeches off them. Soon there’ll be a Spanish bailout, perhaps French, German & UK bailouts too – when are people everywhere going to stand up and say NO to this nonsense?